Events

Register here to attend. A light lunch will be provided. An RSVP is required to attend.

Join us for our Kanner Forum featuring Jeffrey Sacks, Associate Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature and Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature and Languages at UC Riverside. This talk will offer a reading of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish in relation to poetic form and the generalizing and obliterating violences of settler life. Rather than exceptionalize the ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people, this talk studies it as an expression of the normative terms for western hemispheric existence and outlines the refusal of these terms in the poetic formulations and reverberations of Darwish’s poetics. To think the poetic in a time of genocide is also to think genocide in relation to the broader terms of settler life as well as the particular enactments of the Zionist state in order to articulate collective terrains of struggle through the poetic: a collective refusal of settler life in the question of Palestine.

The talk will be followed by a Q & A moderated by Saree Makdisi, Professor and Department Chair of English at UCLA.

Jeffrey Sacks is Associate Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature and Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature and Languages at UC Riverside. He is the author of a forthcoming book, Poeticality: Anontological Form and the Critique of Settler Life (Fordham University Press) and Iterations of Loss: Mutilation and Aesthetic Form, al-Shidyaq to Darwish (Fordham UP, 2015). He has published a translation of Mahmoud Darwish’s Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone? (New York: Archipelago, 2006).